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Travis Waterman, the manager at LC Hamburgers Etc on Prairie View Road, has been manning the grill there for seven years. Owner Mark Potts (rear) lends a hand during a noon rush.
The Germans may have invented the hamburger, but Americans have perfected it.
We slap them on the grill to celebrate our nation’s birthday. We stack them on platters to share with friends and family on Memorial Day and Labor Day picnics. Shoot, entire industries have been built around fast-food burger drive-throughs that feed our families, day in and day out.
Could our culture, our very lifestyle, survive without the burger? I think not. Thumbing my nose — albeit temporarily — at cholesterol numbers, I set out on a quest for the best burgers in Kansas City. I was seeking places old and new, high-brow and dumpy. I focused on bacon double cheeseburgers and fries or tots. I washed them down with chocolate malts with extra malt powder. Generally I got the works: lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, mayonnaise and ketchup. It seemed the LTOPMK was de rigueur. I don’t do mustard.
By day, I feasted on burgers. By night, I dined on bowls of low-fat, high-fiber cereal. And though it was a grand time, I’m thinking my next bacon double cheeseburger will be far, far, far in the future.
In no particular order, here are some places that have put the lowly patty on a pedestal.
•GrandStand Burgers: 4942 Merriam Drive, Overland Park, 913-362-0111. Hours: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday.
Plopped in the middle of an asphalt slab parking lot, sort of like Dorothy’s house after the tornado, GrandStand Burgers promises “Best Burgers.” In a meat-obsessed town, that’s a mighty promise.
I step out of the car and suck up a big gulp of air. It smells just like my house did when I was a kid and my mom was frying up hamburgers. We raised our own beef; the GrandStand beef smelled just as steely and fresh.
At Nick Marchi’s burger joint, God and Dale Earnhardt Jr. get almost as much play as his fabulous burgers. Marchi was in Christian broadcasting for 20 years, and he’s a huge NASCAR fan.
Six years ago he took over the beloved burger joint, which had been some sort of burger and ice cream parlor since the early 1960s. Inside, the space is as tight as a galley kitchen on a jumbo airliner. The three people working behind the counter weave around each other in a well-choreographed, well-greased dance.
Marchi takes the orders and blends the made-from-scratch chocolate malt. His brother-in-law Marc Hurley is the grill guy, turning tennis ball-sized wads of beef into half-inch-thick patties, reheating foot-long slices of Scavuzzo’s bacon and griddling buns until the edges get all crispy and crunchy. Kevin Stoker is the condiment master and the one who hands the final product to salivating diners.
The lowdown: There are only four stools in the place but several picnic tables outside. The tots are served spectacularly hot and crunchy. Each patty is one-third of a pound. Their most popular burger is the Kelly Burger: a double cheeseburger with a slice of ham and two strips of bacon.
Marchi also says they do a great tenderloin. If his tenderloin is as good as his burger, I’ll take this man of God at his word.
•Hayes Hamburgers: 2502 N.E. Vivion Road, 816-453-5575. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For 53 years folks have been straddling the stools and hunching over the diner counter at Hayes, a 22-seat diner at the intersection of Vivion and Antioch roads in the Northland. The itty-bitty diner does breakfast, burgers and chili, pies and biscuits and honest shakes and malts.
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